January 30, 2013

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should show intellectual and moral
courage to denounce Savarkar as the Hindutva ideologue and look for superior
mentors if they can reach out to any. Perhaps, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Sri
Aurobindo, though it will not be easy to reduce these two literary giants to
the vulgar and crude formulations of Hindutva ideology. The sensitive
Maharashtrians who take pride in Savarkar are insulting themselves and the Maharashtra tradition. They should look to Mahadev Govind
Ranade and Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak was a
conservative but he was a great leader.

He respected Gandhi even when he dismissed Gandhi's moralism as
quixotic. But in the 1919 Amritsar Congress session he fought a losing battle
with Gandhi and saw Motilal Nehru and Chitta Ranjan Das supporting Gandhi.
Apparently, he told the senior Nehru and Das that they will move away from
Gandhi's populist politics. And this from the man who was a populist leader in
his own time, and that was his battle with the liberal Gokhale…

Gandhi was an anti-intellectual and he was in his own way a very
unreconstructed Hindu traditionalist. One of the best critics of Gandhi was
Bhim Rao Ambedkar and his lecture on Gandhi, Jinnah and Ranade is a classic
piece showing the stupidity and egotism of Gandhi and Jinnah as leaders. So
there are ways of debunking the Gandhi myth, but Savarkar did not have the
intellectual sophistication to do that. That is why he resorted to the morally
despicable manner of getting ridding of Gandhi…Gandhian ideals are plain stupid in political and historical senses.
What was good for Gandhi could not be good for India. So, we can and we must differ
with Gandhi… Posted by Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr at 9:18 AM

One of Philpott’s goals in *Just and Unjust Peace* is to challenge
both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and
justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as
the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic
freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an
ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does
justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” more
»

Before embarking upon our journey into Meditations on the Tarot (which seems to have gone out
of print again), I'd like to begin with a discussion of the meaning and purpose
of esoterism more generally, since so much of it can appear a little dodgy, as
if we're just deepaking the chopra rather than engaging in the Eternal Science
(or the science of eternity).

However, it has always been understood that, for example, scripture is
susceptible to multiple levels of meaning: the literal or plain meaning; the
allegorical, or implied meaning; the conceptual meaning; the moral meaning; the
more abstract and esoteric meaning; etc. more »

I take Spinoza’s insistence on necessity, over against contingency, as
an antagonism toward standard Christianity, with its themes of exemplarity and
incarnation. Nothing can be an example of anything else because everything is
equivocal; nothing can be prior to anything else because everything is
univocal. The univocity of every different thing thus stems not from a muting
of difference’s equivocity, but from an affirmation of the necessity of
everything in its difference. In other words, univocity has to do with
necessity; the refusal of analogy, with its contingency, is inseparable from
the affirmation of necessity. In fact, we might think of this insistence on
necessity as forming its own kind of reading practice: one must read whatever
happens as necessary; if one reads what happens as contingent, then one has
failed to understand what happens.

Indian English Drama: Thematic
Reflections - Galaxy PDF - Quick View Indian
English drama got some innovative thematic concerns which were able
to ... Karnad's wide
handling of history, myth and folklore to tackle
contemporary issues has been widely appreciated by .... tradition with modernity. That is why the ...

Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation
of Indian English Drama
PDF - Quick View Mar 1, 2012 – The Criterion. Myth and Puranas: Decolonisation
of Indian English Drama ... grounded in the tradition of the past and it is
of real life presented in a fictitious manner. This has led ... It is a history told in a story.
According to ... Although
modernity has invaded, Indians have not left their
culture and tradition.

Shahjahan lives in the past, Dara in the future, and Aurangzeb in the present. Aurangzeb’s
success is the triumph of pragmatism but he has to pay dearly as we find him in
the last scene sitting not on his Peacock throne but beside it on the floor.
His loneliness becomes his tragedy. The play ends with him asking himself he
question: ‘Am I a devout Muslim or a fanatic?’ He is left awaiting the
judgement of history.